Introducing New CS-Cart Line for Business-to-Business: CS-Cart B2B and CS-Cart B2B&B2C:

2. CS-Cart B2B—a special edition for building business-to-business eCommerce websites. It has all the features of CS-Cart B2C, plus special B2B functions that help to automate the purchasing process for companies. The price tag is $2,450.

3. CS-Cart B2B&B2C—the most advanced CS-Cart edition, which includes all the functions of B2C and B2B, plus the multi-store feature. Use it to start a store with both B2C and B2B independent storefronts. The price is $4,750.

Why We Released CS-Cart for B2B and Why You May Want to Start Your Own B2B Store?

Well, B2B eCommerce grows very fast. According to Forrester, B2B eCommerce will reach $1.8 trillion and account for 17% of all B2B sales in the US by 2023. And it will grow by 10% annually within the next five years.

According to our own research, modern entrepreneurs want to make purchases for their businesses easy and fast as they do it for themselves—online. They don’t want to waste time on phone calls, connecting with suppliers, and ordering from dozens of locations all over the region. B2B eCommerce websites are an effective solution to release entrepreneurs from this purchasing routine.

Considering the tendencies and statistics, it was no surprise for us to get tons of requests from our customers for developing the B2B functionality for CS-Cart. Moreover, we discovered a bunch of B2B online stores built on the standard CS-Cart and modified for the business-to-business model.

The decision was obvious. Now, you can start a powerful B2B eCommerce store on CS-Cart out of the box.

CS-Cart B2B has all the functions of the standard CS-Cart B2C, plus five B2B functions to automate the purchasing process and communication with purchasers. CS-Cart B2B&B2C includes all these, plus one more killer feature—multiple storefronts. Let’s take a closer look.

1. Close Storefronts, Hide Prices

Close your B2B storefront to hide products and prices from unauthorized users. To see the catalog, a buyer needs to log in to the store.

This way, you’ll be sure that you do business with reliable companies and hide the catalog from prying eyes. This feature also helps to strengthen the moderation—you will check and approve registered purchasers manually.

To close the storefront from unauthorized users, go to Administration → Stores → Choose a storefront → Access for authorized customers only.

Close storefronts, hide prices

2. Personal Prices for Purchasers

You can create user groups with different privileges. For example, create two different groups for small and big wholesale buyers and set individual discounts for them. If a product has a discount already, it can be ignored—the buyer only gets the individual discount. To create user groups, go to Customers → User groups. In Marketing → Promotions, create discounts and assign them to the user groups.

Another cool feature here is Client tiers. It assigns a purchaser to a privileged user group when they spend a certain amount of money. It greatly automates the price formation for purchasers. You can even schedule the regular user group update via CRON. To set up client tiers, go to Add-ons → Manage add-ons → Client tiers.

Personal prices for purchasers

3. Multiple Users in One Customer Account

The purchasers can create multi-user accounts. As a rule, the purchasing process in companies involves more than one person. For example, a manager creates an order, a supervisor checks it and pays, and an accounting guy works with the papers. No need to share account credentials—they all can work in one account as different users.

Make sure the Organizations and representatives [Beta] add-on is active. In Customers → Organizations, create a company. Go to Customers → Customers and assign a customer to the company as an owner. Now, this customer can create users for the company in his or her account.

Multiple customer accounts

4. Add Products to Cart in Bulk

Companies usually buy products in bulk, so it’s important to optimize the order formation process to make it faster. The Add products to cart in bulk feature allows purchasers to quickly add a big number of items at once to the cart. They can do it right on the product category page.

Let’s assume a purchaser is ordering 100 items of different cooking equipment at once. Just imagine how many times the guy will need to click the Add to cart button and then return to the category page over and over again. That’s a huge waste of time. With the Add products to cart in bulk feature, the purchaser ticks the product checkboxes on a convenient product list and clicks the Add to cart button just once. Time saver!

Go to Add-ons → Manage add-ons and make sure the Add products to cart in bulk add-on is on. Now your customers can easily put multiple items at once to the cart.

Add products to cart in bulk

5. Price List Downloading

Purchasers can download the price list right from their customer accounts. The cool thing is that the price list shows actual prices for the purchaser, taking into account individual discounts.

Moreover, a purchaser can download the price list from the cart. This price list only contains cart products. The purchaser just forms a sales proposal from it and sends it to the ultimate buyer.

You can configure this feature in Add-ons → Manage add-ons → Price list for customers.

Price list downloading

6. Multiple Storefronts (CS-Cart B2B&B2C Only)

With CS-Cart B2B&B2C, you can create an unlimited number of storefronts and manage them via one administration panel. The cool thing about it is that you are free to configure storefronts independently: the look and feel, products, prices, payment and shipping options, pages, and other parameters.

Create two storefronts: for B2C and B2B. Set different prices, product descriptions, remove online checkout from the B2B storefront and even close it for unauthorized users. On the B2C storefront, create promotions for end customers and on the B2B—for companies (promotion rules for B2C and B2B can differ a lot). Now, you literally have two independent stores managed from one admin panel.

Other B2B Functions

Easy integration with third-party services: accounting systems to update prices automatically, CRM to get more orders and keep in touch with your purchasers, ERP, EDI, ads, analytics, and whatnot.

Warehouses: this feature comes in handy when you have several warehouses. It informs purchasers about the number of items in stock and helps you track inventory in warehouses.

Administration privileges: CS-Cart allows registering employees and set different levels of access to the admin panel.

Fast order creation in the admin panel: create orders manually in the admin panel without even touching the mouse. Your managers will be able to quickly create orders for purchasers talking to them on the phone.

Easy re-ordering: purchasers can re-order the same products with the same quantity by just clicking one button in the customer account.

Product variations: product variations are a perfect tool to effectively demonstrate your product range to the purchasers and help them pick the right product from a range of similar products.

In-stock notifications for purchasers: if a product is out of stock, you can allow the purchasers to order in advance or subscribe to the in-stock notification.

Low-stock notifications for admins: once the number of items decreases to a defined threshold, you will know that it’s time to refill the stock.

Personal manager information block: add a block with any HTML content to any page. For example, show a block with a personal manager’s name, photo, and phone number on the purchaser’s account page.

45 product parameters: you can configure a product by tweaking 45 product properties.